


They Used to Shout My Name, Now They Whisper It

by Le Mot de Cambronne (GilraenDernhelm)



Series: Politics/Soul [2]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: AU, Depressing, Hurt/Comfort, Inspiration, Lots of historical liberties taking, M/M, Whimbling and woffling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 02:07:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4503732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GilraenDernhelm/pseuds/Le%20Mot%20de%20Cambronne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Companion piece to 'But Somehow Through the Storm' in which Arno visits Napoleon on Elba following Josephine's death. In the light of my previous work, this could technically suggest that the two only ever seem to hang out on islands, but what the hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Used to Shout My Name, Now They Whisper It

When I entered, I thought he must have heard me coming.

He was fumbling with a candle and a light, and muttering to himself in a language I didn’t understand.

It took me thirty seconds of standing in the dark to understand that he hadn’t heard me at all; that tonight he feared the dark more than what was hiding within it.

As I crossed to where he lay on his elbow, mumbling and striking and failing, his muttering grew louder and more exhausted: a wordless protest against moving…against hauling himself upwards; against unlocking the door; against opening his mouth; against speaking.

On some nights, I still feel that way. On some days.

It was only when I finally stood before him that he succeeded in lighting the candle. The light showed him my face, and it showed me his. I caught a brief glimpse of bloodshot eyes and hollow, narrow cheeks. Then he was speaking to me; repeating my name again and again; his arm thrashing forward and seizing hold of my collar, as though afraid I would disappear.

‘Arno…Arno…Arno…’

Arno. He had only ever called me that when we were arguing, or in bed, but tonight he whispered it like something he had learnt and didn’t want to forget as he collapsed into a state that he would never have permitted me to see him in had he been right, and full, and whole.

I’ve tried to write it down; to describe it; to record it. I can’t.

* * *

 

We sat before the fire and drank wine. Bonaparte poured a glass for me, then committed the decidedly un-imperial action of drinking the rest of it out of the bottle.

He spoke.

‘I would be most grateful if you would forget the manner in which I received you.’

I spoke.

‘What manner is that?’

When he smiled in response, it was like the sun.

I pushed the thought aside.

‘Why have you come?’ Bonaparte asked.

I thought about telling the truth.

_Because I know. Because the whole of Europe knows. Because she’s gone. Because that means a part of you is gone too. Because I know._

Instead, I told half of it.

‘Uh…Hortense wrote to me.’

‘ _Hortense_?’ Bonaparte repeated; looking both surprised and disconcerted.

Were it not for the firelight, I would swear that he was blushing.

‘I didn’t think Hortense knew about… erm…’ he stuttered.

He recovered quickly.

‘Women should not be _au courant_ of such things,’ Bonaparte declared.

‘Maybe Pauline told her,’ I suggested; partly because it might be true; partly because Pauline was sublime proof of the untruth of that previous statement.

But he was shaking his head; his fingers tapping agitatedly at the arms of his chair.

‘No,’ he dismissed.

He no longer wore his glove on one hand.

‘You must admit that keeping secrets about your indiscretions was never Pauline’s strong point,’ I hastened to point out.

‘Pauline didn’t tell her,’ Bonaparte insisted.

‘ _How do you know_?’ I insisted.

He shrugged at me.

‘Because I told her not to.’

That angered me so much and so suddenly that it was a great effort on my part not to strike him. It rose in me like a whirlwind and tore at my insides like a good Persian knife.

‘You tyrant; _you bloody tyrant_!’

He looked at me as though I were a tiresome child.

‘If you’ve come all this way to insult me, then you might as well leave,’ he suggested.

‘I didn’t come far _at all_!’ I snarled; waving my arm in a grandiose gesture so I wouldn’t strangle him with it; ‘it was _barely an inconvenience_. I was in Naples –’

‘Killing someone?’ he interrupted.

‘ _Yes, killing someone!_ ’

‘Not Murat, by any chance?’

‘No.’

‘Damn.’

I collapsed backwards into my chair and reminded myself why we were no longer friends.  Making himself Emperor after a fucking Revolution notwithstanding, the man was an insufferable twat.

I had promised him the last time we had met that if I ever saw him again, it would be as a target rather than as a friend; the former being the only conceivable reason that I might _want_ to see him again. I had meant it, at the time.

And yet here I was. As a friend rather than an assassin; as a thing that I was not meant to be. Knowing that Joséphine had died. Knowing that it would shatter him. Knowing.

I looked at him again. He was gazing into the fire as though he had entirely forgotten that our little _contretemps_ had taken place, and I saw that he was wearing that ridiculous green uniform again, buttoned up to the neck as though in anticipation of some parade he had forgotten about. His face was grey with a kind of exhaustion that I recognised from my own face. In every curve and line of his body was weight and defeat and anguish, but his eyes were bright and burning, as they always were, like a thunderstorm in spring. Blue. Grey. Then blue again.

He spoke of her.

‘What rankles most is that I did not know it the moment it happened,’ Bonaparte told me; his voice flat, dead; ‘I felt nothing inside me…die, or cry out. Nothing. Aren’t you supposed to feel it, when someone you love dies?’

‘You’ve read far too many novels,’ I grudgingly replied.

He looked at me. His eyes burned.

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing comes first,’ I told him, ‘something comes later.’

Napoleon drew a shaky breath and held my gaze, and I knew that he was remembering Elise. Remembering me.

And I knew that he knew why I had come.

He wiped his eyes and quickly avoided mine; staring at the shadows on the floor.

‘I… _almost_ managed to keep my composure when they told me,’ he said, ‘then somebody was good enough to mention that her last word was ‘Bonaparte’. And…’

He covered his eyes now. For a moment I could hear nothing but the sound of his breathing. Then he sat so quickly upright in his chair that I jumped.

‘What the devil did she mean by it?’ he demanded; as though Joséphine could not have done a less considerate thing; ' ‘ _Bonaparte_ ’. What did she mean?? How did she say it? _Why_ did she say it? Was she thinking of me? Was she cursing me? Did she still love me? _What?_ ’

He then proceeded to scratch at his scalp with both hands, as though he had lice.

‘Even in death she manages to be the torment of my life,’ he growled.

‘And you were the torment of hers,’ I coolly replied, ‘fair’s fair.’

He glared at me.

‘I?’ he demanded.

I pretended to think about it.

‘Yes.’

‘ _I?_ ’ he seethed; his hands bunching into fists, ‘what did _I_ do, apart from play the cuckold and the fool?’

‘I could say a number of very cruel things,’ I remarked; undeterred; ‘but I will confine myself to the divorce and the manner of it.’

Bonaparte scoffed wildly, and looked pityingly at me, as though I were five years old.

‘I had no wish to divorce her –’

‘You could have fooled me!’

‘I _didn’t_!’

‘You didn’t.’

‘I loved her!’

‘So humiliating her in front of the whole of Europe was a token of affection; I see. Is this some Corsican tradition I haven’t yet heard of?’

‘How DARE you speak to me like that, _petit merde_?’ he roared; flinging himself to his feet.

‘Do calm down, Bonaparte; you’ll hurt yourself,’ I replied; not flinging myself to mine.

‘ _You_ are making an immense _fool_ of yourself, Dorian; it is eminently clear that you have _no understanding of politics._ ’

‘Politics,’ I spat; finally getting to my feet; ‘let me tell you a story about you and your _politics_. The night of the explosion on the Rue St Nicaise: _do you remember_?’

‘I distinctly remember your failing to disarm the bomb.’

‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’

‘Much good may it do me.’

‘After the initial furore had died down, when you asked me to watch Joséphine and Hortense while you decided which heads would roll and why…the memory of it haunts me. Joséphine sat awake all night watching Hortense toss and turn in her sleep while I stood silent at the window, watching. Then without turning to look at me, she asked me, ‘you’re him, aren’t you?’

There was a silence like glass breaking.

I watched him turn bone white, then ash grey. I watched the strength in him collapse. He took a step back from me; his eyes growing damp again as he slowly raised his hand before his mouth: palm outwards, as though protecting himself from the smell of death. He shook his head.

‘No,’ he said; his voice cracking; my body freezing; my mind numbing. 

I had expected him to brush my words away like wind, just like he did everything else, not this, not –

He was shaking his head frantically now.

‘No. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you. I DO NOT BELIEVE…’

He broke.

I watched him.

‘Bonaparte –’

‘Why have you told me this? _Why?_ ’

Watching him was like watching Reason lose its mind.

When I touched him, he recoiled and lashed and pushed and flung; the violence in his hand red-hot and agonising…and magnetic, as all heat becomes when meeting metal: its natural twin, its _âme sœur._

He stood in my arms, sinking his nails into my wrists; my back; my waist; stifling his brokenness against my neck, so that I could feel his teeth.

‘I can’t,’ he murmured, again and again, ‘I can’t, I can’t, _why have you told me this, why, why…_ ’

After a time, I lifted my right hand, and let it rest on the back of his neck. The skin boiled. I let my fingers pass over the few, small strands of hair there. My fingers were like ice.

After a time, I felt him loosen. He laid his head softly against my chest, and said nothing. My fingers stroked the same spot, again and again. I felt his skin cool beneath my skin.

‘I _hate_ islands,’ he said after a long silence, not moving his head from my chest, ‘it would have been a merciful action on the part of a benevolent deity to have never created islands at all.’

‘Corsica is an island,’ I softly pointed out.

‘I rest my case,’ he muttered.

‘You need a hobby, my friend,’ I suggested, in a poor attempt at humour, ‘why not put your personal guard to collecting butterflies? It’s bound to be more interesting than marching up and down all day and always ending up where you started.’

He took his head off my chest so quickly that I thought he was going to hit me. But he looked at me sharply and intently, as though his life depended on what I might say next.

 And suddenly his eyes were aflame: aflame, awake, thinking, imagining.

‘It is _incomparably_ boring to march up and down all day and always end up where you started,’ he said, ‘there isn’t even a presentable enemy to make life a little less dull.’

‘Quite so,’ I conceded; starting, for some unknown reason,  to regret my words; ‘perhaps you don’t even need to march at all; marching is a little pointless on an island; why not read; reading is good; why not order thousands of books and set yourself a time limit?’

‘A _time limit_?’ he snorted, ‘where do you suppose we are? At school?’

‘You said you were bored!’ I insisted.

‘I _am_ bored!’ he replied, ‘I am inestimably bored; and forced to watch from afar while that fat king drives into the ground everything that I have built and made and done –'

_Oh God. He thinks he can escape._

‘Maybe the reports you’ve heard have been exaggerated!’ I suggested, suddenly desperate, _Seigneur Dieu, what have I done –_

‘My spies do not exaggerate; _that is why they are mine_!’ Bonaparte roared, ‘and they tell me that the weather in Paris is _glorious_ at the moment.’

'You're going to get yourself killed.'

'How else should a general die but fighting? '

I watched helplessly as the fire roared up in his eyes; as the smile returned to his face; as the energy poured into his veins like molten gold made of life.

And he bounded to the door, opened it, and bellowed out into the corridor, uncaring that it was the middle of the night and that everyone was sleeping.

‘Marchand!' he shouted, 'My maps!’


End file.
